Spanish Officials Analyze Surry Plant

July 18, 1995|By JUDI TULL Daily Press

SURRY — At a time when the United States and the nuclear industry are grappling with the question of what to do about permanent storage for nuclear waste, European leaders are looking to Americans for guidance in forming their own storage plans.

On Monday, three members of the Empressa Nacional de Residuos Radiactivos of Spain, or ENRESA, joined with nine members of the Spanish parliament's committee on industry to tour Virginia Power's Surry nuclear plant to learn more about the facility's dry storage for spent fuel.

The Spanish contingent met with Virginia Power's Ron Berryman, manager of nuclear analysis and fuel, and Marvin Smith, a systems engineer, to learn more about how the system works and to visit the storage site.

"We knew that Virginia was operating this system very successfully, and we wanted to see it," said Alberto Lopez Garcia, director general of ENRESA, a government-owned corporation responsible for management of the spent fuel and radioactive waste from Spain's nine nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power has been used in Spain since 1968, Garcia said, and the country has been a leader in the production of casks that can be used for storage and transportation in the United States. The Surry tour was a preliminary step in analyzing the operation of transferring the fuel to the tanks for storage in their own country.

In 1986, the Surry facility was the first in the United States to use casks for interim storage of spent fuel rods after they have been removed from the plant's storage pools. Currently, there are 26 casks, each holding 15 tons of radioactive nuclear waste, sitting on 3-foot thick slabs of concrete at a storage site about a mile from the nuclear plant.

Five other states - Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota and South Carolina - also have run out of storage space in the pools where fuel usually is kept and are using the dry-storage system. At Surry, the rods stay in the water for a minimum of five years before being moved to the dry-storage casks, according to Smith.

The casks, each costing about $1.2 million, are constructed in Spain, Germany and Japan.

The cask system was intended to be a temporary solution to the problem of storing nuclear waste. In 1982, legislation charged the federal Department of Energy with taking over possession of the spent fuel by 1998. Federal officials now say that goal is unlikely to be met. The Energy Department has spent 13 years and $4.5 billion exploring a site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas as a possible permanent location, but questions have arisen about the safety of that location.

Virginia Power has ordered 14 additional casks from a Pennsylvania company, to be delivered over a period of three to four years, and will soon add a concrete pad to hold the additional casks, said Berryman.